Health

Undeterred after a stray bullet, the artist within is reborn BY TED GREGORY | CHICAGO TRIBUNE

CHICAGO - In the past couple of years, about 20 paintings by Mariam Pare have been reproduced and sold internationally. In February, she'll be a featured artist in two shows. And, any day now, she expects to take a job that will pay her a comfortable salary to paint.

Those are intoxicating developments for any artist, especially Pare. She paints with a brush in her mouth.

That's how she has created art since 1997, a year after a stray bullet struck her spinal cord while she was driving and she watched her hands drop from the steering wheel. In that instant, a promising young artist from Naperville, Ill., became a quadriplegic.

Pare, 38, has risen from that hopeless place by tapping the mysterious neurological pathways that allow creative expression to flow through a broken body. Today she is an arts activist and teacher who survived a life-changing plunge into Lake Michigan while strapped in a wheelchair. She's also part of an exacting, profit-driven group of artists with disabilities who see in their work financial independence and life purpose.

"I paint out of necessity, a compulsion," Pare said one afternoon while working on a painting of a woman floating in a bubble. "I love doing it so much that I don't think I have a choice in the matter really." She laughed. "I paint because I love to paint."

When she's not struggling through daily life, working to expand community outreach for art or promoting its therapeutic value, Pare paints in a 10-by-10 room in a second-floor apartment near Naperville Road and Ogden Avenue. She says if she were unable to paint with a brush loosely set between her teeth on the right side of her mouth, she probably would wear a helmet with a paintbrush and make that work.

Pare used her right hand to draw and paint since she was a child, and, after moving to Naperville at age 11, it served her well through Jefferson Junior High and Naperville North. She won first place in Naperville Art League shows and had a favorable portfolio critique at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where recruiters urged her to enroll, she said.

Instead, Pare headed to San Francisco. She worked in an art supply store, waited tables, studied at a community college and was accepted into an art school there. A few months before starting classes, Pare went to Virginia to visit a friend.

Shortly after sundown on a rainy Thursday, March 28, 1996, she and the friend were driving near Richmond, Va. Pausing at a stop sign, Pare wondered why so many people were gathered on a corner in the rain. Then she pressed the accelerator.

"I heard the popping of the gun, and I saw the glass flying and it all happened really fast," she said. "It was just noise and then I couldn't move. I didn't know I'd been shot. I just felt a kind of bolt of electricity behind me and a flash of heat."

She was 20 years old. Authorities never made an arrest, and three months after the shooting, Pare was airlifted to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Staff slowly drew her off a breathing machine and gave her invaluable strategies to deal with her new life. About two months later, an occupational therapist put a pen in Pare's left hand to write her name.

She failed. The therapist suggested she try with the pen in her mouth, and Pare was astonished to find that her writing looked nearly the same as when she could use her right hand.

"I was like, oh, wow, I could apply this to painting," Pare recalled. "Maybe I could draw, or maybe it might be fun to paint while I'm in here and have all this time. That's when I kind of got excited and decided to explore what I could do again."

Forging that path, as arduous as it was for Pare, is a "fascinating" property of the brain, said Dr. Daniel Potts, neurologist and associate professor at the University of Alabama. Founder of Cognitive Dynamics, an organization focused on expressive arts therapy for cognitive disorders, Potts noted that the brain's capacity to generate art remains after a paralyzing injury.

The issue becomes how to bring out that art.

"When the end point of the normal motor pathway is taken away and the drive to produce art is still present," Potts said, "the brain and motor system work to create a new mechanism for artistic production."

Exactly how that happens remains somewhat mysterious and theoretical, but Potts said the basic concept that the brain finds another path for expression after an injury is widely accepted. And, Pare's transition makes more sense when one understands that regions of the brain controlling the hand and mouth are fairly close to each other, Potts said.

He compared it to someone taking the back roads to get to a destination when the interstate is blocked. Pare's brain has "rerouted the motor output to the mouth and the muscles of the neck," Potts said. As she, or anyone else, continues to work, those pathways develop further, "much like when a pianist gets better playing scales with practice," he said.

Pare takes a similar view.

"It's something that's inside you," she said, adding that her knowledge of "what the paint could do" and how to use it were advantages when she resumed painting. "Your aesthetics or your sense of gesture isn't necessarily physical or associated with the limb you use."

The larger issue "is the triumph of the human body, this indomitable drive to create, despite the affliction," Potts said. "There is still a person who can tap into that creativity, which says to me that the parts of the brain involved in creating and expressions of creativity are very powerful."

That capacity, he said, is a key reason people with disabilities should have opportunities to create.

"I think stories like Mariam's bring home the point that we should never give up on folks with disabilities," Potts said.

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